Canadian Perfidy
By Stephen Brown
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 10, 2003

"Damn Americans. I hate those bastards."

That’s what Toronto-area Liberal Member of Parliament, Carolyn Parrish, proclaimed last week.

Once again, the anti-Americanism of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's Liberal government has resurfaced, this time in its starkest, most unrestrained form to date. Another Liberal fiasco.

This latest bash-America blunder comes on the heels of last November's shameful incident when Francoise Ducros, Chrétien's communications director, had to resign after calling President Bush a "moron" for his tough stance on Iraq. Last year also saw another piece of unqualified, Liberal stupidity vis-à-vis the United States when MP Bonnie Brown compared any U.S. attack on Iraq to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the Nazi aggression in Europe.

Like Ducros, Parrish uttered her hate-filled comments with reporters present. At the end of a media scrum in Parliament about Iraq, she was caught on camera saying: "Damn Americans. I hate those bastards." Her disgraceful behavior, however, only proved once again that, despite Chrétien's cautioning party members against anti-American outbursts, some Liberal MPs are so full of hatred for the United States they can't restrain themselves, even at media events. (One can only wonder what they say when the press isn't around.)

Parrish, a former high school principal, apologized later for the incident, but only after further disgracing herself by trying to strong-arm one of Canada's national newspapers into not reporting her comments. When The Globe and Mail first asked Parrish about them, she warned the paper that if it reported her comments, not to bother calling her any more – and that she would work to restrict reporters' access to areas of Parliament.

In reality, Parrish's threats are more frightening than the incident itself, since, in their arrogance and conceit from a decade in power, the Liberals are starting to sound and behave like a third-world dictatorship.

But the Parrish hate-incident against a good friend and neighbor is about the level of moral behavior Canadians have come to expect from the Chrétien government in the War on Terror. It was recently revealed, for example, that the Canadian government had asked the United States not to send a Canadian al-Qaeda member to Guantanamo Bay, since the Canadians were worried the detention facility there was too cramped.

As well, a murderous Palestinian terrorist, ordered deported from Canada four years ago, is, to no one's surprise, still here. Mahmoud Mohammad Issa Mohammad was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine when he and another terrorist attacked an Israeli airliner at Athens airport in 1968 with guns and grenades, killing one Israeli. The Greek government sentenced him to 17 years in jail, but pardoned him only two years later when Palestinian terrorists hijacked another plane and forced his release.

Mohammed came to Canada in 1987 and lied about his past to get into the country. When discovered, he took advantage of Canada's notoriously lax immigration laws and filed a refugee claim. Mohammed, who is not incarcerated, has argued since then that Canada should respect the Greek pardon. Besides, he said he and his terrorist partner never meant to kill anyone.

And while Chrétien is trying to hinder America's strategy against Iraq with a foreign policy initiative that will see any attack delayed until the end of March, he has unashamedly employed a cunning stratagem to keep Canadian ground troops from participating in the coming war. In a typically sleazy move, Chrétien has decided to send 2, 800 soldiers (almost all Canada has left) to Afghanistan, so that when the bullets start flying in Iraq, he can honestly say he has no soldiers to send there.

In still another embarrassing episode, last week a 40-year-old helicopter crashed to the deck of a Canadian destroyer that was heading to the Gulf to head a 20-ship task force. These "flying coffins" were to be replaced ten years ago, but Chrétien, in one of his first acts after taking power, cancelled the contract, costing Canadian taxpayers $500 million in cancellation fees and further risking flight crews' lives.

The response of John McCallum, Chrétien's defense minister, to the sad state of Canada's forces on the eve of war was typically Liberal: threatening and arrogant. He warned armed forces advocates he would slash defense funding if their criticism of his government continued.

But after ten years in power, such despicable Liberal behavior doesn't surprise conservative and American-friendly Canadians. To their minds, Chrétien's tenure in office has simply lived up to the old Chinese saying: "Follow a wolf, you eat meat. Follow a dog, and you eat s**t."

And we're still getting it by the bucket-full.

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Stephen Brown is a journalist based in Toronto. He has an M.A. in Russian and Eastern European Studies. Email him at alsolzh@hotmail.com.